On This Day In Video Game History: March 10

On March 10, 2000..

Bill Gates unveiled Microsoft's new video game console, the Xbox, at the Game Developers' Conference in San Jose, California. Audiences at the conference were impressed at the console's technology. Around this time, the popularity of Sega's Dreamcast was slowly going down and Sony had just released the PlayStation 2 a few days earlier.

Following its announcement, the vice president of Microsoft's Games division Rick Thompson boasted that the Xbox was a "future generation device" that will offer "the most advanced graphics, the most flexibility in Internet gaming, and the most realistic play of any game console on the market." The name for the console was originally "DirectX box" but it was changed to Xbox after its focus testing. The Xbox was the first video game console that featured a built-in hard disk drive for internal game saving and for storing games downloaded from Xbox Live.

The Xbox was officially released on November 15, 2001 in North America
and was discontinued in the later part of 2006 to make way for its
successor, the Xbox 360.

Were you in attendance at the Game Developers' Conference when Bill Gates announced Microsoft's Xbox? Did you eventually purchase the video game console or did you choose to sit this one out?

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